Latvia appears in the book chiefly as the historical and political setting of an unusual episode in Henning Mankell’s Wallander series. In The Dogs of Riga, an investigation that begins with two Russian bodies found near Ystad takes Kurt Wallander into Latvia and brings him face to face with the upheaval of national independence and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The book treats this direct encounter with large-scale history as a revealing exception in Mankell’s fiction: an attempt that fails where the novels’ more oblique treatment of distant conflicts succeeds.

Latvia in The Dogs of Riga

The novel, the second in the Wallander series, begins with the murder investigation in Sweden. After two Russians are found dead on the coast near Ystad, Wallander follows the case to Latvia. There he becomes entangled in what the book calls the great public story of the moment: the explosion of national independence and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Latvia is therefore not merely a destination in the investigation; it is where a local crime plot opens onto a vast political transformation.

People and connections

In Latvia, Wallander encounters Liepa Baiba, the widow of an honest Latvian police investigator. She becomes his temporary love partner, joining the investigation’s personal thread to the country’s political setting. The book also notes a linguistic joke in her name: it reads Liepa as a Slavic word for beautiful and uses that association to suggest a familiar, flirtatious description. This detail gives Wallander’s Latvian episode an intimate element, even as the larger political upheaval threatens to overwhelm the crime story.

Historical scale and narrative significance

The book contrasts this episode with the usual structure of Mankell’s police stories. Those novels begin with a brief prologue in a poor country outside the affluent West before moving to Ystad; the distant setting remains a background presence rather than a place Wallander directly enters. In The Dogs of Riga, that boundary gives way: Wallander crosses into the arena of history itself. The author’s judgment is sharply negative, describing the novel as a complete failure, contrived and pretentious. In this reading, Latvia marks the point where bringing the protagonist into the great political story does not produce a convincing artistic form.

Contrast with Mankell’s two perspectives

The criticism of the Latvian episode also clarifies what the book considers Mankell’s stronger achievement. Mankell divides his life between Ystad and Maputo, where he runs a small theater and writes and directs plays performed by local actors. The book presents the affluent Swedish town and the Mozambican capital as perspectives that remain irreducibly out of sync: neither supplies a neutral language that can translate or settle the truth of the other. Latvia, by contrast, is treated as an overambitious attempt to insert Wallander directly into a major historical upheaval. Its narrative function is thus comparative: it helps distinguish the failed pursuit of the day’s great story from an artistic practice that records the unresolved gap between different worlds.